Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy

by Charles Dickens

"Our hero's father" Jemmy goes on "proving implacable and carrying his
threat into unrelenting execution, the struggles of the young couple in
London were severe, and would have been far more so, but for their good
angel's having conducted them to the abode of Mrs. Gran; who, divining
their poverty (in spite of their endeavours to conceal it from her), by a
thousand delicate arts smoothed their rough way, and alleviated the
sharpness of their first distress."

Here Jemmy took one of my hands in one of his, and began a marking the
turns of his story by making me give a beat from time to time upon his
other hand.

"After a while, they left the house of Mrs. Gran, and pursued their
fortunes through a variety of successes and failures elsewhere. But in
all reverses, whether for good or evil, the words of Mr. Edson to the
fair young partner of his life were, 'Unchanging Love and Truth will
carry us through all!'"

My hand trembled in the dear boy's, those words were so wofully unlike
the fact.

"Unchanging Love and Truth" says Jemmy over again, as if he had a proud
kind of a noble pleasure in it, "will carry us through all! Those were
his words. And so they fought their way, poor but gallant and happy,
until Mrs. Edson gave birth to a child."

"A daughter," I says.

"No," says Jemmy, "a son. And the father was so proud of it that he
could hardly bear it out of his sight. But a dark cloud overspread the
scene. Mrs. Edson sickened, drooped, and died."

"Ah! Sickened, drooped, and died!" I says.

"And so Mr. Edson's only comfort, only hope on earth, and only stimulus
to action, was his darling boy. As the child grew older, he grew so like
his mother that he was her living picture. It used to make him wonder
why his father cried when he kissed him. But unhappily he was like his
mother in constitution as well as in face, and lo, died too before he had
grown out of childhood. Then Mr. Edson, who had good abilities, in his
forlornness and despair, threw them all to the winds. He became
apathetic, reckless, lost. Little by little he sank down, down, down,
down, until at last he almost lived (I think) by gaming. And so sickness
overtook him in the town of Sens in France, and he lay down to die. But
now that he laid him down when all was done, and looked back upon the
green Past beyond the time when he had covered it with ashes, he thought
gratefully of the good Mrs. Gran long lost sight of, who had been so kind
to him and his young wife in the early days of their marriage, and he
left the little that he had as a last Legacy to her. And she, being
brought to see him, at first no more knew him than she would know from
seeing the ruin of a Greek or Roman Temple, what it used to be before it
fell; but at length she remembered him. And then he told her, with
tears, of his regret for the misspent part of his life, and besought her
to think as mildly of it as she could, because it was the poor fallen
Angel of his unchanging Love and Constancy after all. And because she
had her grandson with her, and he fancied that his own boy, if he had
lived, might have grown to be something like him, he asked her to let him
touch his forehead with his cheek and say certain parting words."

Jemmy's voice sank low when it got to that, and tears filled my eyes, and
filled the Major's.